News Corporation

This Murdoch company is in the news again today with the most recent appearance of James Murdoch before the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking at the News of the World.

The name of the company is usually abbreviated to “News Corp”, and it’s interesting how many people pronounce this without the final ‘p’ – /’nju?z k??/. The pronunciation /k??/ is normal for the word corps, as a military unit, but I don’t remember ever having it heard as an abbreviation for corporation except in this context. Some BBC reporters are ‘guilty’ in this respect, but presenters such as Martha Kearney on The World at One are keeping to the longer pronunciation, which is the only one given in both the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation. The latest edition of the EPD that I own doesn’t give the abbreviation at all. I wonder how long it will be before the innovative pronunciation finds its way into the dictionaries.